Tasks sure do pile up. As a parent with summer on the way, there are family plans and travel plans, and then there are professional tasks—I’m going to GenCon this year, and to WorldCon, and teaching at Alpha Young Writer’s Workshop—and then there’s upkeep, the shopping and cleaning and cooking and prep. And of course the Augean stables of e-mail. And the amorphous not-yet-tasks, the hypotheticals, the perhaps-I-shoulds and the someone-oughtas, green fields I might should explore for my own business or passion, or to keep myself from settling into a rut.

Every few years I return to my copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done and bask in its promise of a better world, where our fields of endeavor are known, revisited, pruned and tended like beloved gardens. In the crystalline mind of Mr Allen each task in your home and work life ends up on a list and each list is reviewed regularly in a meditative state, lovingly and without judgment. Each blooms in its time. Some slumber beneath the earth and wait for their season. But all are known, and all are cared for.

You don’t want to see my garden, is the point.

One challenge I find in applying this sort of ‘project management’-style thinking to the home (or to the integrated home-work life of the lone operator), is that much of what I do in a day is base load, recurring tasks that must be accomplished for the wheels to stay on the bus, and most of the time this base load exceeds capacity. This is in part a lifestyle design issue, and in part an external-constraints issue (How to Keep House While Drowning is great on the spiritual and perspective work that can help in the face of this sort of constant pressure)—but it does mean that ‘projects’ tend to accumulate on lists and sit there. The longer they sit, the more they seem to acquire a judgmental character. It’s not their fault! Their face just looks like that.

So I stray from the garden of crystalline lists, and end up… well, doing my best. I stay on top of most of my base load, most of the time, responding to emails and emergent crises as I can. But this way lies another sand trap: nothing urgent tends to get addressed until it becomes urgent, which means that things that aren’t urgent—or can be more easily dismissed as selfish, like mental or social health—tend to get shuffled to the bottom of the pile. Even urgent tasks suffer from this approach—they do get done, but often later than I’d like, and there’s a certain adrenal cost to running around putting out fires all the time. And then there’s the philosophical cost of feeling like whose agenda is entirely at the mercy of deadlines—a weird sort of pre-programmed feeling.

Recently I’ve found some joy in a dirt-simple (and delightfully low-effort) strategy I first encountered on, I think, MauriceMoves’ youtube channel—and, in the way of such things, saw in five other places within a week. In lieu of a comprehensive list of all pending actions, I define a day’s “big three”: at some point, ideally the night before, when writing in my journal, I settle on three main objectives for the day. One of those is the highlight task, the day’s joyful focus—on work days this is writing or working on a book, yes, but I try to make it more specific, like “finish this scene” or “solve this problem.” The other two items on the list are sometimes work-related and sometimes home-related; the key is that they matter, and aren’t likely to get done unless I form the firm intent to do them. I make my bed, I cook dinner, I clean the dishes, I answer email; it’s nice to recognize that I do these things, and they do need to be planned for and it does help to celebrate their accomplishment—but mixing those into the task list feels more overwhelming and distracting (and, you know, sometimes one does cry uncle and call for takeout, or let email simmer, or figure the laundry will keep ’til tomorrow!). When I check off the Big Three, I know I did my part to put my own spin on the day—I might not have accomplished everything, but hey, I did some big things I set out to do.

Sure there’s more.

But it can wait for tomorrow.